Clute and Nicholls' Encylopedia of Science Fiction traces the
first modern use to Jack Williamson's The Cometeers (1936, book
version 1950). The distinction between mechanical robots and organic androids
was popularized by Edmond Hamilton in his Captain Future series
a few years later, and had become a feature of mainstream press discussion of
SF by 1958.

OED II says "An automaton resembling a human being", with cites for the
older variant "androides" going back to 1727.

General SFnal term for a hypothetical technology of local gravity
nullification or control allowing objects (especially vehicles) to levitate
or fly without wings, ducted fans or other aerodynamics. There are variants
including contragrav and agrav, understood to be
equivalent.

Antigrav is functionally similar to a reactionless drive, but unlike the latter it
is often assumed to be limited to operating near a planetary surface or other
large mass. It is generally (but not always) assumed that antigravity is a
major consequence of forcefield technology, which
is applied in many other ways.

Shortened noun form of "autonomous" used to describe a non-humanoid robot. First appeared in the "Dr. Who" episode "Spearhead
from Space" in 1970, then in "Terror of the Autons" (1971). Best known from
(apparently independent) usage in the Realtime novels of Vernor
Vinge, c.1980. Not found in other SF to date, but in speculative use among
some software researchers as a shorthand for "autonomous system" referring to
a software agent.

General SFnal term for hypothetical technologies which combine genetic engineering, surgical, and nanotech methods to make the manipulation of living
tissue as readily available and sophisticated as present-day construction and
manipulation of nonliving artifacts.

When first generally used in the 1950s, this term was narrower in scope
and limited to surgical methods for altering existing organisms, as opposed
to creating new ones.

A space-going autonomous war machine the size of a small asteroid,
programmed to destroy all intelligent life not resembling its long-lost
creators, and usually to build copies of itself with the same mission.

This term is the signature of one author (Fred Saberhagen's) series of
stories, but has also passed into general use by other authors using (usually
less potent) versions of his berserkers as part of their story
backgrounds.

(The word originally referred to a type of Norse warrior prone to battle
frenzy.)

Critical term for a peculiarly British equivalent of the post-holocaust story in which civilization is
destroyed by some overwhelming natural disaster and the protagonists
undramatically fail to cope. Paradigmatic examples include J. G. Ballard's
The Wind From Nowhere and John Christopher's No Blade of
Grass.

Though the setting of this form is similar to that of the American
post-holocaust story, the psychology and tone is quite different. Where the
American form is heroic, fantastic, and obsessed with struggle, the British
catastrophe novel is anti-heroic, involuted, and obsessed with futility.

A cryogenically-preserved human awaiting revival by future technology.
Strongly associated with the "Known Space" future of Larry Niven, but used
elsewhere. According to Niven, the term was actually coined by Frederik
Pohl.

Critical term widely used to describe a subgenre of SF that is generally
imitative of or inspired by William Gibson's Neuromancer and
Count Zero (though the source stream goes back through John
Brunner's 1975 The Shockwave Rider to earlier works like
Frederic Pohl's Day Million (1966) and Murray Leinster's
The Wabbler (1942)).

Cyberpunk SF is mythically fascinated by computer networking,
human/computer interfacing and biosculpture, but
tends to approach them with a dark and cynical attitude. Cyberpunk writing
tends to be stylish, dystopian and humorless. At its best (in works like
Walter John Williams's Hardwired, Bruce Sterling's
Schismatrix or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash) the
form poses hard questions about the extent to which digital intelligence and
advanced biosculpture may transform human
experience.

The totality of all the world's networked computers, represented as a
visual virtual 3D domain in which a user may move and act with consequences
in the real world. Now widely known (and widely abused) in the mainstream;
today's Internet does not yet have the most salient characteristics of
cyberspace.

General SF term for a technological melding of human and machine, with the
machine parts intended to enhance normal human abilities and environmental
tolerances. The term was first coined in astronautics but quickly crossed
over into SF, acquiring grim and mythic overtones perhaps best expressed by
H.R. Giger's dark biomechanical fantasy art.

General SFnal term for a weapon that operates by disrupting molecular
bonds. Often implicitly a short form of gravitic disrupter which
hypothetically disrupts by using focused oscillating gravity beams to shake
or vibrate its target to pieces, or sonic disrupter which uses focused
sound waves to similar effect. Seldom a hand weapon.

A robot. This somewhat misapplied contraction of android is not much used in other SF (LucasFilms has a
trademark on it!). It is now widely known outside SF circles but only used
mythically of fictional characters.

A sphere around a star, a macrostructure proposed as a possible habitat of
very advanced civilizations who wish to capture the entire energy output of
their sun.

Bob Shaw set Orbitsville on a Dyson sphere. Some astronomers
have speculated that the reason we don't see signs of advanced civilizations
in the sky is that they're living in Dyson spheres, which trap their radio
noise and look like large stellar remnants radiating only in the
hard-to-detect infrared.

General SFnal term of art for what was classically called clairvoyance and
now called "remote sensing" by parapsychologists. The term ESP was coined as
a term of art by early parapsychologists at the Rhine Institute and also
included telepathic and empathic ability. It is no longer much used
scientifically.

General SFnal term for a human or other sophont
able to use ESP. In George O. Smith's classic
Highways In Hiding and many later novels the term specifically
excludes telepathic and empathic ability, being restricted to modes of
clairvoyance or remote sensing.

Critical term for one of SF's most unique and characteristic forms;
stories about first meeting between human beings and nonhuman
sophonts. In the classic form, spacefaring human beings specialized
for the job of exploration and alien contact encounter aliens on an
unexplored planet (or occasionally, as in the Leinster classic, human and
alien starships meet by chance while on missions of science and
exploration).

The humans have a starship full of resources and tools which the reader
implicitly understands fairly well; effective weapons, fast flyers and
planet-to-orbit transit, well-stocked scientific laboratories, etc. They are
confronted with a puzzle (in the better examples, several linked puzzles).
The story details the puzzle, and how they solve it, in a way that attempts
to surprise, entertain, and perhaps educate the reader.

The rewards of reading this form of SF, and the challenges of writing it,
resemble those of classic locked-room murder mysteries, another form in which
the apparent poverty of the framing device to an uneducated reader conceals a
rich wealth of intellectual and psychological possibilities. But in SF these
possibilities are much broader in scope. In the first-contact story, SF
authors are challenged to construct entire alien worlds, ecologies, and
societies with depth and plausibility such that, at the denoument, the reader
says "I should have seen that coming!" but did not.

[from Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories of the 1960s and early
1970s]

Mildly derogatory term for someone who's never been off a planetary
surface, i.e. into space. Resonant with the term used in Edwin A. Abbot's
classic mathematical fantasy Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions to describe two-dimensional creatures unaware of the third
dimension of space.

While this term is strongly associated with Larry Niven's fiction (in
which it specifically describes a resident of Earth), other writers have used
it. Compare groundhog.

General SFnal term for a personal flying vehicle, typically not winged but
rather using some form of antigrav or exotic
aerodynamics such as ducted-fan and Coanda-effect technology. Unlike a skimmer, a flitter is capable of free flight.

General SFnal term for a hypothetical technology which can interact with
any material object in the ways that magnetic fields interact with magnetized
ones. A forcefield may be deployed as a shield around a spaceship or other
object (a force shield). Other applications
include the tractor beam, the pressor beam and antigrav.

The concept goes back to E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark stories,
a classic space opera series originally launched in 1928; those books
referred to force screens. By the time of Asimov's
Foundation in the 1940s the idea had been sufficiently
naturalized that his world featured personal force shields as a defense
against the blaster.

In "Doc" Smith's and most later versions, a force shield has no thickness
and has resistence proportional to the power of the generator. It is possible
to overload a shield by throwing more energy at it than the generator can
handle, or to wait for the exhaustion of the generator's power sources.

General SFnal term for hypothetical means of circumventing the Einsteinian
speed limit, these being necessary to a large class of SF plots that require
easy travel between star systems. The abbreviation goes back at least as far
as the late 1950s. Compare hyperspace, NAFAL and see stardrive.

[established by Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky (1958);
earliest appearance may have been Don Wilcox's "The Voyage That Lasted 600
Years" (1940)]

General SFnal term for a hypothetical form of NAFAL
starflight in which many generations of crewmembers live out the long transit
time of an interstellar voyage, functioning a closed and self-sufficient
society within a very large vessel set up as a closed miniature of a
planetary ecology.

General term for technologies based on the sophisticated manipulation of
genetic material, used widely in SF for three decades before going mainstream
in the early 1980s. In SF this term has much wider scope than current
real-world applications involving tailored bacteria and transgenic plants; it
is understood to include the creation of chimeras and entirely novel animals
or (especially) varieties of humanity.

Literally the Martian verb "to drink", metaphorically "to become one
with". To know deeply or achieve unity with. The word enjoyed a vogue in the
1960s counterculture. It seems to be in the recognition though not production
vocabulary of many educated mainstream English speakers, and is still used
casually on the Internet.

Another mildly derogatory term for someone who's never been off a
planetary surface, i.e. into space. Also used to describe a person
travelling in space but unaccustomed or incapable of adapting to ship
or station conditions. Probably as widely recognized as flatlander, though less used.

One common model of FTL travel is that a starship can
somehow exit normal space to a domain in which the lightspeed limit does not
apply, or the geometry of the realm permits quick transit between points
widely separated in normal space.

General use of hyperspace as a term for such domains dates back at
least to the 1940s; it is found in Asimov's epochal Foundation
novels and probably predates those.

Critical term for an SF adventure set on an Earth colony world which has
lost contact with the founding civilization, and (usually) regressed to a
lower level of technology resembling that of pre-industrial Earth. Often told
either from the point of view of spacefaring humans re-contacting the planet
or of natives accidentally encountering or deliberately attempting to regain
their lost heritage.

This framing element is enduringly popular because it combines wide scope
for combining stirring and mythic derring-do with other SF tropes. Versions
narrated by space-faring modern-minded humans can pose some of the same sorts
of puzzles that make first contact stories
popular. Versions narrated by the regressed locals can make effective use of
a sort of Sophoclean irony, presenting certain facts about the world in a
distorted and mythic form known to the locals which the reader can enjoy
decoding more fully. All versions can partake of the virtues of the frontier
or edge-of-empire tale.

[common SFnal short form of nanotechnology; the latter seems to
have been coined by K. Eric Drexler in the 1980s]

The (so far hypothetical) technology of manipulating matter exactly, and
efficiently, atom by atom, as opposed to via bulk methods such as heat,
pressure, mixing etc. The tools of nanotech are themselves of molecular
scale, thereby combining the autonomy and flexibility of living cells with
the reliability and designability of machines.

Nanotechnology implies a world in which material scarcity is very nearly a
thing of the past, because any desired object can be duplicated exactly at
minimum energy cost. The only shortages might be of very rare elements,
energy, and human attention.

General SFnal term for a weapon analogous to a firarm (usually a handgun,
the long-arm equivalent is a magrifle) that fires
needle-like projectiles, usually by magnetic acceleration but possibly with
chemical explosives. In the Lensman novels a needler or needle
beam was an energy weapon, but this image has fallen out of use.

Common term for technological teleportation. This particular term (and the
shortened form transmat) are most often used of
technologies that (hypothetically) disassemble matter at a transmitting
location, then beam it to a receiver where it is reassembled atom-by-atom.
Other versions of matter transmission involve the use of wormholes or quantum
indeterminacy. Larry Niven explored the common logic of teleportation in a
1967 essay "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" that is still regarded
as definitive.

[coined on the model of "bootlegger" by Larry Niven in Death By
Ecstasy, 1969]

General SFnal term for a dealer in illicit body parts for organ transplant
surgery, usually acquired by kidnapping and murder. Sadly, real-world reports
of such activities in Third World countries have appeared in recent
years.

A flying machine that uses flapping wings. This term is well known to
historians of flight; Leonardo Da Vinci drew pictures of ornithopters in his
famous sketchbooks, and several early-20th-century attempts at powered flight
were ornithopter variants. Unfortunately for their inventors, flapping wings
are only effective given the high power-to-weight ratio of avian muscle. We
cannot yet attain this in the real world, but SF is free to assume it in the
future.

General SFnal term for a long-arm analogue of a blaster, often conceived as a longer-range and more
destructive weapon with much higher energy requirements. Often specifically
imagined as using plasma-producing directed explosions to send a bolt of
energy or superheated gas at the target.

General SFnal term for an application of forcefield technology that can push on material
objects at a distance ranging from feet to miles. Perhaps popularized by E.E.
"Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. See tractor beam (which is more common).

General SFnal term for a hypothetical means of propulsion through space
not dependent (as is a rocket or mass driver) on expelling reaction mass and
using Newton's Second Law. The default assumption (seldom spelled out) is
that such a drive is able to use some form of exotic forcefield physics to get traction on the fabric of
space itself. Compare antigrav.

A hoop around a star; an artificial macrostructure designed to provide a
surface area billions of planetary surfaces in size. The life zone is on the
hoop's inner surface, with side walls to hold in the atmosphere. Gravity is
provided by centrifugal force, day-night alternation by a ring of shadow
squares orbiting separately closer to the star.

Niven invented the idea and the term as a perhaps more feasible variant of
the Dyson Sphere. The term has since become
general.

Critical term for a type of adventure SF describing with life after the
destruction of present-day civilization. In the 1950s and 60s the default
catastrophe was nuclear war; those stories featured a semi-standard landscape
of ruined and slagged-down cities haunted by hideous mutants human and
otherwise. More recent versions have often dealt in virulent plagues or
catatrophic ecological collapse. (See also catastrophe
story, superficially similar but psychologically quite different.)

The post-holocaust story may deal with survival in the immediate
wake of the event as in Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon; with
chaos or recovery after a decade or so, as in The Postman
by David Brin or Damnation Alley_ by Roger Zelazny; with
the re-development of civilization several generations down the road,
as in A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller or
The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card; or with
primitive societies for which the pre-holocaust period is remewmbered
only as a legendary era of magic, as in Star Man's Son by
Andre Norton or Vault of the Ages by Poul Anderson.

The subgenre was more popular in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s than it is
now. It has become mainstreamed as a common frame for comic books and
implausible, low-brow adventure films like the Mad Max series.
Nevertheless, notable fantastic treatments like Sterling Lanier's
Hiero's Journey and inspiring versions like Brin's The
Postman have continued to pop up occasionally.

A regeneration tank is a device that assists a damaged human body in
healing and regrowing missing parts. The term has been in general use since
the 1950s; at least one early use was in James Schmitz's Agent Of
Vega stories. The image that goes with it is of an unconscious subject
floating in a complex nutrient bath.

An electromechanical construct with humanlike capabilities; a mobile,
self-aware thinking machine. Interestingly, the first SFnal use of this word,
in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R., referred to what today would
be called an android rather than an electromechanical
artifact.

This word is ubiquitous in SF, quite well known in the mainstream, and
seriously used to describe a large class of industrial machinery with some of
the autonomy and intelligence ascribed to fictional robots.

An evolved biological intelligence. Implies human-level cognitive and
linguistic ability but not necessarily tool use. More specific and
etymologically correct than sentient. Still less
common than that term, but has been used by multiple writers.

General term for a subgenre of adventure SF in which the men are heroic,
the women beautiful, the monsters monstrous, and the spaceships make
whooshing sounds in hard vacuum.

Star Wars and its sequels are perhaps now the paradigmatic
examples, but real SF fans instantly think of great early works like E.E.
"Doc" Smith's Skylark novels of the 1920s and 30s and the even
more popular Lensman novels of the 1950s. The Star Wars movies
themselves owe much to Edmond Hamilton's 1949 novel The Star
Kings and its sequel Return to the Stars. Once upon a
time, in the great between-the-wars era of the pulp magazines, almost all
genre SF was divided between space opera and dystopian cautionary tales.

[first detailed in Heinlein's Space Cadet (1948) but the idea
probably goes back to early space opera]

Microgravity nausea. Analogue of motion sickness produced by confusion of
the human vestibular system in the absence of a gravitational vertical.
Correctly predicted in SF long before the first manned spaceflight; however
NASA assiduously avoids the SF term.

A technology permitting FTL travel that can be built
into individual space vessels (as opposed to methods like Tipler machines or
dirigible wormholes that would require stationary large scale engineering
with exotic forms of matter). Also hyperdrive.

SF writers have been particularly ingenious in rationalizing star drives.
Most posit some form of hyperspace; there are many
variations on this idea. One, popular in recent years and well represented by
the Niven/Pournelle classic The Mote In God's Eye, involves
"jump points", regions of space that are connected in a way that enables
instantaneous transit between them possible, given the right engines.

Some writers have attempted to pull quantum physics rather than General
Relativity into service. Drives based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
go back at least as far as Gordon Dickson's Mission To Universe,
1965. Poul Anderson's major works assume a stardrive that persuades all the
subatomic particles in the ship to simultaneously quantum-jump thataway. Some
other writers have imagined drives which convert a ship to tachyons and back.

A common assumption of most stardrives is that they cannot be used within
the gravity well of a planet-sized object (otherwise your drive would behave
more like teleportation). Starships therefore have to use some more
conventional form of propulsion (or perhaps antigravity to leave planetary surfaces. Recent SF
frequently assumes that even the near presence of a star is sufficient to
prevent a star drive from operating, so starships must go from planetary
orbit to near interstellar space before engaging the stardrive.

Another common assumption (especially accompanying ``jump point'' and
other instantaneous-transit drives) is that the transition into and out of
stardrive is stressful and disorienting for humans, rendering them
temporarily unable to function just after a transit (this may be called
jump shock or transit shock).

For an excellent summary of recent speculation on possible star drive
mechanisms by physicists, see John Cramer's Alternate View
column from November 1996.

General SFnal term for a non-lethal weapon analogous to a firearm that
renders the target unconscious. The standard assumptions about stunners are
actually quite detailed; they are short-range weapons, easily blocked by
walls or furniture, and victims are often groggy or nauseated or otherwise
physically sub-par for some time after regaining consciousness (this
condition is generally called stun shock). Usually they are imagined
to use either some sort of infrasonics or a soporific dart.

Hypothesized by physicist Gerald Feinberg in a famous 1967 Physical
Reviews article. Frequently used in SF to justify ansible devices. John Cramer has written a good popular
exposition of tachyon physics in his October 1993 Alternate View
column.

A human or other sophont capable of directly
reading the thoughts of others.

This terms seems to have originally been coined by 19th-century
spiritualists and Theosophists and used to include both mind-reading and
remote sensing; earliest OED cite is from 1883. It was established in SF by
the late 1940s, completely replacing earlier terms such as ``mind-reading''
and ``thought transference'' perhaps (ironically) because it had the crisp
Latinate sound of a scientific term.

[coined by Jack Williamson in Collision Orbit
(Astounding, July 1941))]

General SFnal term for the art of modifying planetary surface conditions
to resemble those of (idealized) Earth, including both macroengineering (such
as the diversion of comets to provide water and volatile gasses) and seeding
with tailored organisms. Widespread in in SF; used speculatively by
astronomers.

General SFnal term for any one universe in a set of branching histories.
Usually implies that travel across timelines is possible, even if time travel
between different points on the same timeline is not.

General SFnal term for an application of forcefield technology that can pull on material
objects at a distance ranging from feet to miles. Perhaps popularized by E.E.
"Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. See pressor beam.

General SFnal term for a mechanical arm and hand; more precisely, a
"remote manipulator" controlled by a human operator which duplicates the
operator's movements.

Heinlein's description long predated the `telepresence' gadgets now common
in high-radiation environments, on research submarines, and aboard the Space
Shuttle. The SF world believes widely that such devices are commonly called
"waldoes" by real-world engineers, but the evidence on this is spotty and
mixed. Apparently some engineering subcultures (including oceanographers and
movie special-effects wizards) use the term, but it is unknown in many
others.

A movie special-effects company called The Character Shop has actually
trademarked this term. Details here.